nisralnasr

Thursday, July 16, 2015

The July 1
battle in which the Egyptian Armed Forces regained control of a small border
town from the self-proclaimed Sinai Province of the Islamic State (formerly
known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis or Supporters of Jerusalem) has heightened fear,
anger, and above all self-congratulation among both the government’s supporters
and its critics.Days after still
unknown assailants had assassinated the country’s Attorney General by means of
a car bomb, IS fighters attacked a series of checkpoints in the northern Sinai
peninsula and appeared briefly to have taken control of Shaykh Zuwayed near the
border with Gaza and Israel.The attack
occurred more or less on the anniversary of massive demonstrations (June 30)
and subsequent coup (July 3) in 2013 when former President Mohammad Morsi was
removed from office.

Most
commentary, and especially in English, has focused on the incapacity of the
Egyptian armed forces to prevent such attacks and the threat to the Egyptian
state of an IS insurgency.The rapidity
with which IS took control of important cities in Syria (notably Raqqa) and
Iraq (Tikrit, Falluja, and Mosul) as well as areas of Libya and Yemen suggest
that much of Sinai and perhaps portions of the Egyptian heartland could fall
easily into its grasp.The argument of
many analysts is straightforward: increasing levels of repression by the
Egyptian dictatorship radicalize the population and drive Egyptians
increasingly to accept the use of violence to overthrow an unpopular regime and
IS stands ready to provide the violence.In this argument that repression occurs in the context of the massive
uprising of 2011 and the democratic elections of 2012 makes more Egyptians
likely to find the regime intolerable and to sympathize with or participate in
armed revolt against it.

The logic
of the argument is impeccable but as with so many arguments about Egypt and the
Arab world over the past four years it turns politics into a morality tale
whose authors are rewarded with victory.

It is more
useful and far more interesting to place the fighting in northern Sinai in the
context of the last 35 years of Egyptian history.Seen thus, the very real limits of the IS
threat to the Egyptian state and the likely continued degradation of the
Egyptian political scene as the government coercively responds to the military
challenge it faces becomes more apparent.As Egyptians become inured to a coarser and more violent political life,
it seems unlikely they will be able to free themselves from it for at least a
generation.

IS is a
locally dangerous opponent and it may be true that the Egyptian Army lost more
men in the first week of July 2015 in Sinai than at any time since the 1973 war
with Israel.However in July 2015 the
Egyptian dead were about 1.5 % those who died in October 1973; and other
attacks in the past several years have taken dozens of lives.The violence in Sinai is real and frightening
but so far it is well within the capacity of the Egyptian armed forces to
repress.

To fully appreciate the meaning of
the events in Sinai we need to look elsewhere.We can begin with the period between 1979 and 1981: the years in which
Egypt, during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, regained control of the Sinai from
Israel and during which Egypt also faced its first (and arguably most
threatening) Islamist insurgency.These
two processes are intricately linked, not least by the assassination of Sadat
in 1981.

Although the Egyptian state
presents the 1973 war as a military victory, Israel won and in the process not
only regained control of the Sinai peninsula that it had first seized in the
1967 war but also a portion of the west bank of the Suez Canal.It was widely believed at the time that it
would not be long before yet another Arab-Israeli war would be fought. Instead
a peace process returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty that
removed Egypt from the Arab military front facing Israel and demilitarized much
of northern Sinai.

Egypt regained control of Sinai
through lengthy and domestically contentious negotiations coinciding with a
period of economic stress best remembered for two days of demonstrations and
rioting in 1977 when the government lost control of the streets in downtown
Cairo.To limit political opposition to
the treaty and to counter popular discontent rooted in economic distress, Sadat
ordered the arrest of some 1500 people in the late summer of 1980.Islamic activists engaged in what we would
now call a Salafi-jihadi current assassinated Sadat and including members of the
self-named “Islamic Group.”

Sadat’s assassination while he
presided over a parade celebrating the October war as a victory is well
remembered globally.Its shadow has
obscured another side of the events of October 1981: the attempt to overthrow
the regime by force.In the days after
Sadat’s assassination, Islamist militants launched an insurrection in the
southern Egyptian city of Asyut.Something like 60 police were killed in the fighting and ultimately the
government regained control of the city by sending in Army paratroop units.Asyut is one of the largest cities in Upper
Egypt and has long been an important government and economic center for the
region.The Egyptian government has, on
occasion, found it difficult socially or politically to dominate many urban and
rural areas but Asyut is the one time in recent memory when it lost control of
a major city for several days due to an armed uprising.That events in Asyut had no echoes in the
rest of the country was, for some Islamist activists, a clear indication that
armed uprisings were doomed as a means to confront the regime.

Sadat’s actual assassins were executed
but other members of the Islamic Group, notably the cousins Abbud and Tariq
al-Zumor, were given lengthy prison sentences.They remained in jail even after they had served the judicial sentences
imposed on them because the Egyptian government believed they posed a
continuing threat.

Sadat made significant progress in
realizing the goals of the Camp David treaty before his murder.As befits a treaty aimed at ending a series
of increasingly costly and destructive wars between states, Camp David provided
strong reassurances that neither party could easily launch a surprise war
again.It did this primarily by limiting
troop deployments on each side of the Sinai border between Israel, the
Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip (then still under direct Israeli
occupation), and Egypt.Although Egypt
had regained sovereignty over the entire peninsula, Sadat had agreed that it
would station no members of the armed forces in a zone stretching from Sheikh
Zuwayed on the north coast to Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip.Only lightly armed civil police would patrol
“Zone C.”

In years since 1981 development in
the Sinai has centered mainly on the tourism industry in the south.South Sinai with about 160,000 people is
lightly populated but it has world-class beaches, scuba diving, and
hotels.One of the few issues that
divided the Israeli and Egyptian governments after the signing of the treaty
was the determination of the exact boundary demarcating the countries at
Taba.A court decision awarded a small
slice of land and two hotels to Egypt, one of which is today the Taba Hilton. In
the first decade of the 20th century there were attacks on tourist
facilities in South but these were decidedly aimed at destroying the traffic
rather than in creating a “liberated zone” such as IS has in Syria and Iraq.Tourism
has not done well in the years since 2011; revenues have shrunk from over $14
billon to under $ 5 billion a year.

North Sinai, never the object of
much investment by Egyptian governments, has suffered an even more catastrophic
economic collapse than the south.Although North Sinai is also lightly populated,
with 420,000 people it is much larger than the south.The largest city, El-Arish, with about
164,000 people, has roughly as many people as all of South Sinai.Sheikh Zuwayed has about 60,000.El-Arish is the largest city in Sinai
proper, but it is not the largest city in the region.Almost as large is Rafah which has 150,000
inhabitants thirty miles away on the Palestinian side of the border.Not far beyond Rafah is Khan Yunis with more
than a third of a million people and 18 miles further north is Gaza City with another
half million.

Much has been written about the
tunnels under the Egyptian-Palestinian border.They have supplied Gazans with cement, medications, and food (most of
which is ordinary and some of which is luxurious).They have been used for weapons (which became
cheap and available after the collapse of the Libyan regime) and drugs such as
tramadol (an opiate medication).They
have been viewed as engines of growth, survival and incubators for
entrepreneurship as well as security threats and lifelines.Less frequently has the estimated $700
million to $1 billion that passed through them been evaluated as vital to the
economy of Egyptian North Sinai.An
impoverished area with little industry, however, would inevitably orient its
economy toward the largest market in the region.North Sinai may be part of Egypt politically
but eastern North Sinai is necessarily connected to the Gazan economy.

In addition to goods, the North
Sinai economy includes traffic in human beings.By some estimates tens of thousands of Eritrean and other African
citizens have attempted to illegally enter Israel through the Sinai border
crossings.Although it is impossible to
accurately measure the number of people involved, international human rights
organizations have described large numbers of people pressed into servitude,
tortured, and held for tens of thousands of dollars in ransoms.As is clear from the American Southwest,
lengthy borders in desolate regions are difficult to police even for a strong
state; where the state has withdrawn it is effectively impossible.

Northern Sinai is also the route of
a pipeline that until 2012 was the major export artery for Egyptian natural gas.A main line connects the central Egyptian
network to El-Arish on the northern Sinai coast where it splits into two parts:
one, underwater, connects with Ashkelon in Israel; the other, significantly
larger, connects to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.The gas connection with Israel was highly controversial and the
pipeline, which provides little direct economic advantage to North Sinai, has
been bombed more than 25 times since the 2011 uprising.Increased demand for gas in Egypt prompted
the government to end the contract with Israel in 2012 and reduce supplies to
the Arab countries.The Egyptian
government has recently decided to allow the import of natural gas via a
reverse flow from Israel through the same pipeline.

Before returning to connect the
strands of the argument so far, it is worth pondering what would happen if Gaza
could trade freely with its Israeli and Egyptian neighbors.Gaza City alone has roughly the population of
the four largest nearby non-Palestinian cities combined: Ashkelon, Ashdod, and
Beer Sheva in Israel and El-Arish in Egypt.The 1.8 million people of the Gaza Strip (or Gaza province of Palestine
if you prefer) are the largest concentration of human beings in the Sinai and
southern Israel region and probably the largest supply of labor.

North Sinai is a gateway for Gaza
as long as its 1.8 million people can neither import directly through their own
port or trade with Israel.The northern towns of Shaykh Zuwayed,
El-Arish, and ultimately Rafah (on the Egyptian side) have provided the otherwise
absent gateway.Egyptian governments
from Mubarak through Muslim Brother president Morsi to now-president El-Sisi
have limited legal economic exchange with Gaza and frequently closed the
official border crossings.Trade has thus required transport
through tunnels, ie, as a form of criminal activity.This is a trade that initially the lightly
armed police were not equipped to deter and were sometimes paid to ignore.Morsi’s government placed more pressure on
this trade but governments since his ouster have been even more assiduous in
shutting it down.

Returning
where we left off: as the 2011 uprising in Cairo and other major cities grew
and the police forces collapsed, the maintenance of public order devolved to
the Egyptian Armed Forces.This required
pulling troops into central Egypt, especially the cities,and left the borders unguarded.The Supreme Council of Armed Forces did
negotiate a very early agreement with the Israeli government to send troops in
South Sinai partly to prevent attacks that would have damaged the tourist
industry but North Sinai receded even further from effective government control.

Unlike other
equally impoverished areas of Egypt, North Sinai in the wake of the 2011
uprising did have one important economic sector: illegal trade.It was precisely its illegality that made it
rewarding. Illegal trade (in the north) and tourism (in the south) are important
drivers of the economy and politics in these two areas.

Foreign
mass tourism in Egypt is a post-Sadat phenomenon and it has provided regime
opponents with a soft target. The most famous and still the most murderous
incident is the 1997 attack on Hatshepsut’s Temple in Upper Egypt in which 68
people (including 6 attackers) died.The
attack was carried out by members of the Islamic Group who opposed a truce some
of their leaders had arranged with the Mubarak government.In 2004, 2005 and 2006 hotels and tourist
attractions in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Dahab in South Sinai were attacked
and more than 150 people killed in total.

Salafi
groups claimed responsibility for the attacks in South Sinai although the
Egyptian state and many external observers see them as the work of North Sinai
Bedouin who hoped to affect the tourism industry.One aspect of the attacks that differentiates
them from 1997, is that they all occurred on holidays associated with the
Egyptian state or Egyptian society broadly speaking.The 2004 Taba attack occurred on October 7 (a
day after the anniversary of the start of the 1973 war and Sadat’s
assassination) and the Sharm attack occurred on the anniversary of the 1952
revolution.The 2006 attack in Dahab
occurred on Sham El-Nessim (the only holiday celebrated by both Christians and
Muslims) that occurs in spring and whose origins are pre-Islamic and
pre-Christian.These attacks thus struck
at the economic roots of the state as well as its cultural and social claims to
legitimacy.

It is not
surprising that within weeks of the beginning of the 2011 uprising some North
Sinai residents had also attacked the gas pipeline. In May 2011 unknown
attackers used a rocket propelled grenade to attack the tomb of the eponymous
Sheik Zuwayed during a period in which attacks on Sufi shrines created mounting
tensions in Egypt.These attacks also
made it clear that not all the arms that traveled through the region had been
sent to Gaza: rocket propelled grenades, high explosives, and automatic weapons
were widely available. In mid-summer of
2011, in addition to the earlier attacks on the gas pipeline and the shrine,
the police station in El-Arish was attacked and 6 policemen killed.In November 2012 an RPG was used to attack a
cement factory in El-Arish.

Although
the army and the Egyptian media have recently alleged these weapons arrive in
Egypt from Gaza, it earlier recognized that their primary source was
Libya.After the collapse of the regime
there weapons became widely available for export.Controlling the border with Gaza is probably
more important as a way of draining financial resources from the state’s
opponents in northern Sinai and also preventing them from having a safe haven
from the Egyptian army.

By August
2011, regaining control over the border area had become a priority for the
Egyptian Armed Forces after a series of cross-border attacks from southern
Sinai into Israel.Who was responsible
for these attacks remains unclear but they did provoke the first serious
exchange of gunfire between Israeli and Egyptian troops in decades.Five Egyptian soldiers were killed when
Israeli soldiers crossed the border pursuing the attackers.Coupled with the earlier attacks on the gas
pipeline, the police station, and the threat to the tourism industry Sinai
became more prominent to the government.Few if any Egyptians were sympathetic to Israel’s security needs but
equally few wanted the decision about whether renewed war would break out to
pass into the hands of North Sinai Bedouin and guerrillas.

A year
later, on August 5, 2012, armed men again attacked an Egyptian military
outpost, killing 16 soldiers, stealing armored vehicles and attempting to enter
Israel where they were killed.In the
days after the attack, then President Morsi asked General Muhamed Tantawi to
resign as Defense Minister and replaced him with Abdel Fattah Sisi who later
mounted the coup that overthrew Morsi.

In mid-May
2013, as the Egyptian political crisis that ended with the coup deepened, seven
Egyptian soldiers were kidnapped.They
were freed but not before a video in which they appealed for help was shown on
the web.Their freedom came after negotiations
between tribal leaders and the kidnappers during which the Armed Forces
appeared to be irrelevant and powerless.

In late
October 2014 armed men launched yet another attack on army checkpoints in
northern Sinai with car bombs, explosives and automatic weapons in which 27
soldiers died and 26 more were injured.This
was the largest guerrilla attack on the armed forces in the history of north
Sinai to date although this, along with the incidents mentioned above, are only
a few of the stream of violence occurring in the area.

The Egyptian
Army, like most militaries, has few tools other than overwhelming force with
which to re-establish control over North Sinai.Opening the border with Gaza would have antagonized Israel and empowered
the Hamas government but it would not have solved the economic problems of
North Sinai; it more probably would have exacerbated them as the smuggling
trade diminished.Of course neither did
directly attacking the smuggling trade endear the military government to the
inhabitants of North Sinai.Specific
investments in North Sinai would take years to result in significant economic
growth and the overall Egyptian economy was shrinking any way as foreign and
domestic investment stalled and then declined.Even had the central government been willing to pay fees to allow gas
exports to transit the national territory, there was no politically appropriate
way to allocate them to local inhabitants.

Armed
elements in North Sinai have proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State and
asserted that they are the nucleus of a “Sinai Province.”How exactly does a region whose insurgents
are, even if loosely, connected to smuggling goods and trafficking people, fit
with the creation of a state-building enterprise whose core is in eastern Syria
and western Iraq?And how does it relate
to a project whose leaders claim it to be based on “strict” Islam?

One obvious
connection is that the Islamic State has emerged in areas where structures of
governance have been destroyed by war and where existing elites have been
politically marginalized. IS itself is
not an armed insurgency against an existing government.It was not organized in the wake of a popular
uprising.It exists where the old state
ceased to exist and few if any structures of governance are in place. In Iraq the American invasion and occupation effectively
destroyed the old Iraqi state and the army.The reconstruction of institutions of governance in the Kurdish north
and the Arab south left the Sunni Arab center largely adrift.A prolonged and exceptionally destructive
civil war in Syria abetted by external actors accomplished an even more severe
result there.In both places armed Sunni
militias competed for influence and control.The details of how the Islamic State defeated its rivals are unclear but
in the absence of a functioning army able to defend the national territory
those are unimportant.The existing
militias (which in Syria include the Lebanese Hizbollah and the remains of the
former Syrian Armed Forces) can defend themselves and their territories.The Islamic State has been unable to move
into ethnically or religiously different areas and its opponents have shown
little willingness or ability to defeat it on its home ground.The Islamic State itself survives, as the
late scholar of state-building Charles Tilly would have recognized, by engaging
in racketeering.It operates a
“protection racket” against competing militias and enforces its own power with
displays of ruthlessness on a par with those of the Zetas and other drug
cartels.The Islamic State has clearly,
as its name implies, created state or state-like institutions but it continues
to require external aid (in the form of recruits and finance), external trade
(in oil and looted goods) as well as internal political acquiescence if not
support.

This brings
us to the events at Shaykh Zuwayed in mid-2015.On May 16 shortly after deposed President Muhammad Morsi was sentenced
to death, three judges in north Sinai were murdered in a drive-by shooting of
the mini-van carrying them from their homes to court.The
execution the following day of six men convicted of membership in a terrorist
cell provoked some domestic outrage and international concern.Far
less attention was paid to events in north Sinai itself where, according
to the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm, the army and police “eliminated seven takfiri
jihadists.” The newspaper described the
killings as revenge for the deaths of the jurists. Government spokesmen began to walk back the
claim that the Armed Forces and the police are involved in a vendetta rather
than enforcing the law, but the immediate perception of the headline writers
may be quite accurate.Something similar
happened after the October 2014.Headlines in the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm proclaimed in large type “No
Mourning Before Retaliation” which may have reflected sentiments in the Armed
Forces but was not itself reported as official policy.

Unofficially retired generals, who
had taken up posts as security advisers and experts, such as Sameh Saif
al-Yazal, Hamdi Bekheit, and Gamal Abu Zikri called for clearing the population
from the area so that the army could eliminate its opponents.Since
the fall of 2014 the Egyptian government has followed this policy and created a
buffer zone up to a kilometer wide on its border with Gaza, razing hundreds of
residences in the process.

The coordinated attack on several army
checkpoints indicated that the Sinai Province fighters have the capacity to
engage in such operations against stationary and lightly held positions. Reports about casualties vary and the Egyptian
government has been careful to limit much news of the operation but it is
generally agreed that dozens of people—soldiers, insurgents and civilians—died.
Unlike the Syrian or Iraqi armies, the Egyptian Armed Forces are extremely
well-armed due to years of aid from the United States and they have retained
their operational capacity and institutional chain of command.It is therefore neither surprising nor the
cause for particularly great congratulations that, using armored vehicles and
jets, they rapidly overwhelmed the fighters of the “Sinai Province.”Nor is it surprising that the army’s
operation took civilian lives as well as that of the IS combattants.

Less
obviousis how events in Sinai play out on
the broader stage of Egyptian politics.The fear of many foreign (and some but fewer domestic Egyptian) analysts
is that Sinai is the beginning of a larger Islamist insurgency against the
nominally civilian but essentially military dictatorship that now rules
Egypt.The reasoning is, as noted above,
straightforward and certainly has merit.The military ousted the democratically elected president of Egypt,
Muhammad Morsi and outlawed the party he represented that was itself the
political expression of the Muslim Brotherhood.The MB is now outlawed, its members are being arrested, tortured, and
(most recently) killed out of hand.Consequently it will (and some of its younger members already have) turn
to violence against the state.Given
that the MB had mass support, a membership of perhaps a million Egyptians, and
that Morsi won millions of votes an insurrection that it leads will be more
powerful than even the ones led by other (Salafi) Islamists in 1980 or the
early 1990s.The fighters of the “Sinai
province” are one pole around which a larger insurrection might ultimately
coalesce.

This is a
powerful scenario but it deploys an overly simple psychology to underpin a
policy argument based on an understandable normative antagonism to
dictatorship.Existing states, whether
democracies or dictatorships, rarely lose to insurgencies.Egypt may be an exception but it is
unlikely.The Egyptian state retains
significant international support—from a superficially unlikely coalition that
includes the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—while Egyptian insurgents
(whether former members of the MB or the “Sinai Province”) have little.It is rare for insurgencies to win when they
have little or no external support and while the central government retains
international allies who provide it with arms and financial support.

If the MB
is indeed moving from confrontation to violence, several of its presumed
harder-line Salafi allies have been conspicuously absent from joining it.The move toward violence by younger members
of the MB may be accompanied by increasing use of Salafi-Jihadi rhetoric but
neither the Salafi Nour party nor the Islamic Group have yet broken with the
regime.Nor, despite significant
criticism of the government, have some of their better-known sympathizers such
as the daily newspaper Al-Misriyyun.This
may be the last legacy of the Sadat era and a final irony of the way in which
contemporary politics has developed.

In the year
after the uprising of January 25, 2011 the Armed Forces freed hundreds of
members of the Islamic Group and other Salafi trends in the same part of the
political spectrumwho had been imprisoned
by both Sadat and former President Mubarak.Whatever political calculations the generals made, at the time it was
presented primarily as accepting court orders mandating the release of
prisoners who had served full sentences.Holding them in indefinite preventive detention was not, the courts had
said in previously ignored orders, in accord with the law or the
constitution.These men, including the
Zumor cousins who had been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Sadat,
re-emerged into political life.Some
have been associated with both the Nour party and others with the Building and
Development party, linked to the Islamic Group.

The experience of many of these
leaders with armed conflict against the Egyptian state was bitter.It had begun with the uprising in Asyut and
continued sporadically until it developed into a medium insurrection in the
early 1990s.This period culminated with
an attack on a Pharaonic temple and prominent tourist destination in the Upper
Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997 where 62 tourists were killed.This attempt to destroy the tourist industry eliminated
what remaining the popular support the Islamic Group had.Thousands of Egyptian police, soldiers,
political activists and ordinary citizens died and those leaders appear, for
now at any rate, to have little desire to resume the bitter conflict that they
survived and lost.Whether this is a
counsel of prudence or commitment to public order we cannot know but they
continue their peaceful (if often politically controversial and extreme)
political activity.They write articles
for newspapers, give interviews, and organize their supporters for what they
hope will be parliamentary elections in the future.They also claim to desire an Islamic state
but evidently not the Islamic State on offer.

The Sinai
Province of the Islamic State will no doubt continue to trouble the border
region of northern Sinai.Until some
agreement is made between the government in Cairo, Hamas in Gaza, and Israel it
will be difficult to catch the Islamic State between the anvil of the border
and the hammer of the Egyptian Armed Forces.But that agreement will, tacitly or openly, probably come.Until that time the Sinai Province may manage
to survive in a region where the Egyptian state is structurally weakened by its
international commitments, its absence of local support and alienation caused
by its violence and political mis-steps.

Two decades
ago the Egyptian state fought one war with Islamists in Upper Egypt where they
had far more local support in a relatively large population.IS in its incarnation as the Sinai Province
has less support in a far more marginal area.It is not likely to be the place from which a successful assault on the
Egyptian state is launched nor will it easily become, like the IS provinces in
Syria and Iraq, a “liberated zone.”That
IS and perhaps other opposition groups have been able to use car bombs in Cairo
and Suez is not necessarily indicative of widening support for a popular
insurgency.On the contrary, as Russian
revolutionaries realized a century ago terrorist violence can legitimate the
state for many citizens and demobilize a popular movement. Whatever else they
have done, President Sisi and the generals have worked tirelessly over the past
two years to demobilize Egyptian civil society.It is instructive in this regard that IS may have paid more attention to
the anniversary of the coup than did the government it brought to power.That Egyptian have become used to much higher
levels of open political violence than at almost any other time in recent
history, however, is a sad reality.

The lasting threat to the Sisi
government lies elsewhere, among core elements of Egyptian society and the
state.These will include general
officers in the Armed Forces if they come to believe that they have lost
control of the way coercion is deployed in society.Loss of control occurs as the forces of order
come to think of their task as the work of vendetta not the provision of safety.And then there will be those with important
economic interests who come to feel threatened by policies that have ceased to
work and who want a larger say in how government is run as well as a growing sense
of fatigue with a military regime.That,
however, is likely to be a long time in coming.

Monday, February 23, 2015

In recent months, to general
horror, the Islamic State (in Iraq and Syria) has carried out many beheadings
and one immolation.So, too, have
others loosely or closely affiliated with it, most recently of 21 Egyptian
Christians in Libya.These events
have provoked significant debate and widespread condemnation on many
levels.Some have argued that
there is nothing Islamic in these actions despite the claim by the perpetrators
that theirs is the Islamic State.Others have argued that whether these acts are Islamic or not they are
far from unique.American pilots,
we are reminded, burned Vietnamese soldiers and civilians to death with napalm
while white Americans tortured and immolated African-Americans by the thousands
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unsurprisingly comparing
the Islamic State to the post-Reconstruction Confederacy is rhetorically satisfying
but not at all illuminating. How, the implicit argument proceeds, can you
criticize people for doing what your own forebears did in the not very distant
past? A comparison that could
provide insight is transformed into a mechanism of demoralization. The question that is worth asking is
precisely why should the leaders of the self-proclaimed Islamic State choose
this particular method of execution?People can be killed by gunfire or exposure and the Islamic State has
used both.Why employ a method
that, like the butchery of animals, requires so intimate a connection between
executioner and victim?Like
lynching, it deploys practices and language that resonate positively and
negatively with a larger population and creates powerful emotional bonds among
both those who perform the acts and those who observe.

Pilots on bombing
raids famously have no connection to those they kill.Gunfire can be close but it is usually mechanical and quick.Lynching, like the recent executions,
required a particularly close physical connection between the murderer and the
victim.This was not a
technological necessity but a requirement for creating boundaries of fear and
loathing within and between communities.

The arguments swirling
around the terrifying executions carried out by members of the Islamic State
re-enact the conundrum of Christianity and lynching.Both now and in the past many Christians vigorously asserted
that there was nothing remotely Christian in lynching. And yet accounts of
lynching are clear: those who undertook it claimed they were acting in accord
with the needs of a Christian community and lynching’s most widely recognized
practice was a distorted version of Christianity’s central image: a man hanging
from a tree.

There have been many
explanations and excuses for lynching. Theodore Bilbo, who served Mississippi
as both governor and US Senator, advocated lynching as the spontaneous justice
of the white Anglo-Saxon men for the supposed misdeeds of African Americans. Toward the end of the 20th
century it became common in academic writing to explain lynching as a form of
terror undertaken largely for rational reasons.With the abolition of slavery and the necessity of ensuring
that African American labor remained cheap, lynching provided an inexpensive
method of terrifying African Americans into economic submission.Lynching was a crude but
effective way to ensure the social control necessary for the production of
agricultural commodities by unskilled labor in the American South just as
whipping, branding, and other forms of torture had in the antebellum period.

An economic
explanation is entirely plausible for much of the violence in the American
south between 1865 and 1955, but it leaves unexamined the specific form that the
violence took.Lynching was
accomplished with impunity but often with little publicity.A significant fraction however was the highly
publicized activity of an entire community.These lynchings were far from spontaneous.They were carried out in a particularly
orderly, even if emotionally highly-charged, fashion.

In 1998 the Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson published a provocative analysis of lynching in a
book titled Rituals of Blood. Patterson
recounts and accepts earlier explanations of lynching as a form of social
control highly responsive to the social, economic and
demographic features of the American South.Drawing on earlier work that classified four types of
lynching (small-scale terrorism, private grievances, semi-legal posses, and
community-wide mobs), Patterson proposed that 35-40 percent were what he termed
sacrificial killings.To
understand the meaning and cultural import of these lynchings, he argues, it is
necessary to see them as forms of human sacrifice.It was a practice that drew heavily on themes of Christian
devotion and was highly resonant within the Christian society in which it
occurred.

Reviewing the
anthropological literature on human sacrifice, Patterson notes that it has been
among humanity’s most sacred rituals and that it played a crucial role in consolidating
a compact of fellowship among the sacrificers.He proposes six defining characteristics of human sacrifice:
highly ritualized drama, performance in a sacred place, fire, the tethering of
the victim, the demonization (or sacralization) of the victim, the disposal of
the body.Patterson’s
characteristics are drawn from the anthropological literature but they also
respond to the particular features of American lynching in which victims were
typically hanged, then burned, and in which pieces of flesh and photographs
were often deployed as mementos or in the literal meaning of the word,
souvenirs.

The decapitations carried
out by the Islamic State are indeed quite similar to the kind of lynching
Patterson refers to as sacrificial killing.The immolation of Muadh Kasasbeh more completely mirrors
Patterson’s paradigm, but it also allows us to see that crucial elements of
contemporary human sacrifice are the creation of a particular set of ritual
elements performed in a ritual space sanctified by previous sacrifices, for
victims who are allegedly both evil and impure.

As in the post-Civil
War South, the Islamic State uses murder for many purposes.One such use is summary justice. There
are accounts and even videos of numbers of captive Iraqi or Syrian soldiers,
police, or simply men of military age being murdered by gunshots to the head.There are also accounts elsewhere of communal
summary justice that strongly resembles lynching. On June 15, 2013 writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misry
al-Yawm, Islam Diyab reported that there had been 25 cases of accused criminals
being executed primarily in villages in the previous six months.These unfortunate men (whose guilt is
undetermined) were beaten to death and their bodies exhibited.Whatever agonies they suffered in the
final hours or minutes of their lives, however, were unrecorded and
unceremonious.Unconscionable as these murders were,
they were not carefully staged or professionally filmed.

The killing of foreign aid workers,
reporters, and now 21 Egyptian Christians as well as a Jordanian air force
officer is different precisely in the creation of a clear ritual which removes
the victim from everyday secular life and forces him to enter the realm of
sacrificial space.There is a
brief period in which the victim, invariably clothed in an orange jump suit, is
made to walk with his captors from a point of origin to where he will be killed.Once there the executioner makes a
short statement proclaiming the reason for the killing. The reason is not the criminal behavior by
the captive but an event in which he did not participate for which his death is
either retribution or expiation. With the exception of Kasasbeh the executioner then uses a
knife to cut the victim’s throat and there is a final scene of the head lying
on or next to the torso of the body.Frequently the execution party shouts “God is Great” as the head is
severed. Nothing about these events is random.The prisoner never appears to display any emotion at
all—neither crying, screaming, or even attempting to escape from the blade. Recent news accounts of Kasasbeh’s death
indicate he was drugged but it is by no means clear if this is common.

These beheadings have
been compared to those of Saudi Arabia but they are clearly different.A filmed account of an execution in
Saudi Arabia shows a woman beseeching the executioner not to kill her as she
vainly thrashes on the ground and tries to escape.That execution itself takes place in what appears to be a
parking lot although many occur in city squares.Grisly, terrifying and inhumane as the execution is,
it is clearly not a ritual.It is
a messy and banal murder of a frightened woman who proclaims her
innocence.The filming itself,
like all images of executions in Saudi Arabia, was made surreptitiously and
like other public executions in Saudi Arabia the location assumes no sanctity
even if human blood is shed there.Whatever the Saudi executions are meant to be, they are not intended to
create the heightened state in victim, executioner or observer of the rituals
being created by the Islamic State.Nor is any record made to exhibit the power of the state.

These IS executions
are performed for the camera.The
executioner proclaims the rationale behind the event and places the ultimate
blame for the deaths on the presumed enemies of Islam—the United States, Britain,
Japan, Jordan, and most recently the Roman Church. Sometimes the victim makes a
confessional statement which is, again, not a confession of criminal behavior
but an indictment of a home government.Such statements may be echoes of previous statements in which the
political authorities are accused of various moral failings, including a
refusal to rescue the soon-to-be-killed victim.

The rituals
surrounding the murders have developed over time. As Yuval Neria and his co-authors pointed out in a 2005
article in the journal Religion (“The
Al Qaeda 9/11 instructions: study in the construction of religious martyrdom”),
the murders committed by the hijackers on 9/11 were conceived as acts of
slaughter.Since the decapitation
of Daniel Pearl such acts have become more stylized, formally developed and
intended as public ritual. A state
that claims religious authority is carrying them out.

Here at least we can
see one aspect of these ritual murders that differs significantly from lynching
given the religious background of the murderers.Patterson notes that trees play a significant role because
Jesus was sacrificed on a wooden stake or cross.For American Christians therefore rituals engaging wood were
culturally relevant and meaningful.Although the Qur’an mentions crucifixion as a punishment for certain
crimes, the practice has little contemporary resonance in Islamic thought or
practice.

What does have
enormous religious significance for Muslims and Jews alike, however, is ritual
slaughter as a form of sacrifice.For Muslims and Jews (unlike Christians), flesh is only acceptable as
food if the animal has been slaughtered in an appropriate way: by rapidly
slitting the throat.It is this
particular form of slaughter that makes an animal ritually available for
consumption. There are other rules: the head is not severed until the animal is
dead; generally the animal should not see the knife; and the animal should not
be aware that it is about to die.Lynching was an obscene parody of the sacrifice that Christians believe
lies at the heart of their religion; the decapitations by the Islamic State are
also a parody of the daily slaughter of animals for human consumption. Does it also
address something at the heart of the religion as well?It does.

The “binding of Isaac”
is well-known to Jews and Christians from the Torah.The same story appears more briefly in the Qur’an where it
may also refer to Ishmael rather than Isaac.The crucial point is that Abraham is initially commanded to
slaughter his son.Abraham agrees
but ultimately is relieved by God of this task after which human sacrifice
ceases to be a religious practice.The rituals surrounding the slaughter of animals for food retain a link,
by analogy, to older practices of animal sacrifice. The Arabic verb (dhabaha)
deployed in the Qur’an is still used for butchering of animals.

Why, if this form of
execution is a form of human sacrifice, has it become so popular with people
who ostensibly (as was the case with American whites in the south) do not
believe in it?These events have
been described as advertisements that seek to attract more recruits to the
Islamic State as well as attempts to terrorize the local population.Both of these may well be true, but
there are, it seems to me, other aspects as well.First, these executions have certainly terrorized foreign
aid workers and reporters who now give areas of Syria and Iraq a wide
berth.

Second, and far more important,
they strengthen the sense of community of those who participate in them.Patterson argued that human sacrifice,
like enslavement, is something done to outsiders.Slaughtering people quite literally transforms them into
animals.By deliberately slitting
the throats of their victims, the agents of the Islamic State are transforming
them into objects void of moral standing.The murders themselves transgress established Islamic (and Jewish) norms
of animal slaughter.These
require the butcher to instantly sever the arteries so that the victim feels no
pain and has no awareness of imminent death. Unlike the national community or the
community of Muslims or of humanity, the community of the Islamic State is not
defined by common human form, good works, language, or even nominally shared
religion.It is defined only
by loyalty to the state and its own ideology.

Like lynchings or indeed any form
of highly ritualized killings they transform observers into participants who
have engaged in behavior that is at once highly charged emotionally and widely
understood elsewhere as criminal.There is, it appears, no way to go backward for those who have
undertaken such rituals which are, like lynchings in the American South,
terrifying parodies of sacred behavior.That the concepts animating this behavior appear, to outsiders, as
something of a pastiche or mash-up of historical events, religious texts, and
apocalyptic cinema does not make them any less useful as tools for
obedience.To the contrary, those
who have adopted such practices and the beliefs that legitimate them have cut
off any path back to the societies they have left behind.

Third, the making of the videos has
the effect of turning viewers into potential members of the community of ritual
killers.No one in the video,
obviously, stands up to stop it and those who watch cannot should they wish to.
This is therefore, for the moment
at least, a literally monstrous second coming of the Islamic state in which, as
William Butler Yeats wrote in a different context nearly 100 years ago, “the
best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”It is a moment in which the
participants on the ground become members of a community bonded by the ritual
shedding of blood while the passivity of viewers reinforces feelings of fear,
anger and disorientation.

NOTE: "Sacrificing Humans" is co-published by Nisralnasr and Jadaliyya.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Most useful in understanding the
different outcomes of what appear to be similar processes in Tunisia and Egypt
are the words Tomasi Di Lampedusa places in the mouth of Prince Tancredi
Falconieri in the novel Il Gattopardi (The Leopard).A challenge to an elite faced with ruin, they
form the epigraph to this essay:If
you want things to stay as they are, they have to change.Lampedusa’s novel is set in Sicily during the
unsettled conditions of the Risorgimento.The problem confronting the old nobility is what to do in the face of
the new Italian nationalism and the revolutionary changes to the state and
society that Giuseppe Garibaldi hoped to impose.To preserve its influence and elite status
(that is, to ensure that nothing changes), the family must accept the new forms
of governance (that is, accept that everything has changed).Prince Tancredi’s observation suggests that
we think of the old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as activeparticipants
who are neither passive nor innocent.

The recent legislative elections in
Tunisia provided an increasingly rare moment of optimism.Political analysts are especially happy with
Tunisia.It has garnered high praise for
passing the “Huntington two-turnover” test that every other Arab country has failed:
the party that dominated the government immediately after the fall of the
authoritarian regime has now peacefully given way to its opposition. Tunisia’s
October legislative election therefore marks what political scientists call the
consolidation of democracy because it seems that all political actors accept
the verdict of the ballot box.

Explanations
of the divergent political outcomes in Tunisia, where an Islamist party peacefully
ceded what power it had gained, and Egypt, in which a similar party was
forcibly ousted, have subtly and forcefully been attributed to a multitude of
causes. Among the most commonly proposed reasons is that the revolutionary
youth never gained mass support or had a solid organization either to compete
with the Islamists in elections or push the revolution to its conclusion.But looking at Egypt and Tunisia together
tells us that’s wrong.The revolutionary
youth in both Egypt and Tunisia had little impact on the outcome either way
whereas the old elite had a very large impact.Democratization succeeded in Tunisia because the old elite was neither
excluded nor subjected to the threat of political or administrative
marginalization.

The underlying thread of many
analyses since December 2010 has been that democracy can be and perhaps should
be the result of a revolutionary rising. It is my belief that democracy, unlike
revolution, is a profoundly conservative as well as inclusive solution to the
problems of social change.Democracy’s success
thus more or less guarantees, for a protracted period of time, that there will
be few political solutions—whether in terms of moderate public policy or
dramatic institutional change—to economic inequality.

To understand why the Tunisian and
Egyptian uprisings have had different outcomes, I therefore propose to leave
aside the dominant narrative of secularism, Islamism, and the political
weakness of the youth in order to focus on a very different issue: what
happened to the old ruling elite outside the central core of the presidency in
the wake of the uprising. It is seductive to dwell on the more contentious and more
emotionally ladenissues such as whether Muslims can be democrats or the
often incomprehensible constitutional wrangling. These lead us astray from the
more fundamental and essential role of the ruling elite, without whom no
country can make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

There are, as far as I can tell, two
different ways of talking about democratization, social upheaval and
dictatorship.One, largely confined to
the left, focuses on the tectonic plates of social cleavage.These are the elements of the body politic:
workers, farmers, landowners, officials, and a handful of capitalists.The second, far more popular within American
academic circles, largely reduces to the interplay of millions of individuals
who must find ways to resolve their differences whether over constituting the
institutions of governance, property rights, or political participation.

Understanding the larger
sociological background of revolt as well as choices that confront generic
individuals are both worthwhile enterprises.What I propose here, though, is that we will gain more traction in
understanding the events of the last four years if we focus on a different set
of admittedly elite institutional actors: members of political parties,
government officials, and holders of significant economic resources.The crucial question to be asked is whether
the political conflicts in the wake of a mass uprising and the collapse of a
regime provided a plausible existential threat to any particular group. Rather than thinking of revolution vaguely as
a rapid and complete change, I prefer a definition proposed by Otto Kirchheimer.Does the new regime destroy the possibility
that the old regime and its members can return to power?This saves us from the implicit mysticism of
structural-functionalism and its game-theoretical descendant in which
individuals carry all of society’s institutions in their own heads. It allows
us to focus on the crucial aspect of democracy:are all parties, including the ones ousted by the collapse of
authoritarianism, able to contest for governance?

Of the many
contextual differences between Tunisia and Egypt we can note three.First the Egyptian courts had a much longer
history of systematic intervention in political disputes than did their
counterparts.Second, the Tunisian
military had never in the 20th century played a direct role in
political or government life.Third, the
level of mass mobilization in Egypt before the collapse of the authoritarian
regime was far wider and exhibited much higher levels of spontaneity than did
those in Tunisia.This is another way of
saying that politics in Tunisia more directly displayed the underlying
capacities of institutions and organizations than did those in Egypt.

In both Tunisia and
Egypt the authoritarian regime centered on a particular figure who had been in
power for decades and around whom an increasingly small coterie of family and
close associates clustered.By 2010 wide
sections of the political elite in each country had been marginalized by a
narrow group at the very pinnacle of authority.In each country the regime
maintained its grip on power partly through reliance on the police and partly
through the manipulation of a single party (the Constitutional Democratic Rally
in Tunisia and the National Democratic Party in Egypt).

In early 2010 there
was every reason to think that Egypt was more likely to experience a successful
transition to democracy than Tunisia.Egypt
had a far more open press environment, more competitive elections, and had
experienced more turnover among government ministers.For example, in 2010 the Tunisian prime
minister, Mohammad Ghannouchi, was the same one who had been appointed more
than 20 years earlier by Ben Ali.Atef
Ebeid, who President Mubarak had appointed as Prime Minister in 1999 (when
Ghannouchi assumed his office) to replace Kamal Ganzouri had departed after a
five year term.Ahmad Nazif, Ebeid’s
successor, had only served seven years when he was replaced on January 30, 2011.Egypt had had three prime ministers in the
two decades during which Tunisia had one.

The story of the
protests in Tunisia and the massive uprisings in Egypt is sufficiently well
known for me not to repeat it.In its
place it is worth looking more closely at other aspects of the subsequent
events in the two countries.In some
ways they are remarkably similar but in other respects they differ
notably.An understandable desire by
many observers and analysts to conflate a revolutionary uprising with the
process of democratic transition has created a narrative that now lacks not
only many details but is, in some ways, a significant distortion of the
political trajectory of the two countries.

As strikes and
demonstrations became more widespread in both countries, members of the
judiciary played an early role in shaping events.Reformist judges appeared from the first days
of the uprising in Tahrir square while in Tunisia the country’s attorneys were
on strike by January 6.Violence against
property in the protests led to the promulgation of a curfew in both Tunis and
Cairo and in both places the Armed Forces refused to fire on
demonstrators.In Cairo, however, where
Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi was both supreme commander of the Armed Forces
and Minister of Defense, the army’s chain of command remained intact and
shielded from civilian interference.In
Tunis, President Ben Ali dismissed the commander of the Armed Forces Rachid
Ammar on January 13.Ammar was
re-instated the following day by long-serving Prime Minister Ghannouchi who Ben
Ali had deputized as president before he fled the country.

The Tunisian Supreme Court first
appeared as an actor in the transition on January 15 when it declared that Ben
Ali was not incapacitated but had quit the presidency.Consequently, Fouad Mebaza3, the speaker of
the Assembly, was installed as president rather than Ghannouchi, who then
remained as Prime Minister.Mebaza3, a
member of the RCD Central committee since 1988, served as the president of
Tunisia until December 13, 2011 when he was replaced by the human rights
activist and Ben Ali opponent, Moncef Marzouki.Had the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court made a similar ruling when
Mubarak left office, it would have declared that either the speaker of the
Assembly, Fathi Sorour or Farouk Sultan, president of the court, was his
constitutional successor.Both men were
as closely associated with Mubarak as Mebaza3 was to Ben Ali.

By January 17, Prime
Minister Ghannouchi announced a new cabinet which contained 12 members of the CDR
including former defense minister Ridha Grira, a graduate of the distinguished
French institute for training high-level civil servants, the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (a distinction he shares with Adly Mansour, the president of
the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court who served as President of the
Republic from the ouster of Mohammad Morsi in 2013 until the election of
Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi in 2014).

Initial attempts to
contain popular unrest that had only grown since Ben Ali fled were
unsuccessful.Neither Ghannouchi’s
resignation from the CDR nor the inclusion of trade union and opposition
political figures silenced protests.Within a day the trade union ministers had resigned and on January 27
Ghannouchi gave up and resigned as Prime Minister.

Ghannouchi’s
replacement was not an outsider by any stretch of the imagination.On the contrary, he was replaced by an even
more central figure from the old regime.The new Prime Minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, had served in several key
positions under the Republic’s founder, Habib Bourguiba.Essebsi was defense minister from late 1969
until June 1970 and then served as Ambassador to France.In Tunisia, as in other former French
colonies, the ambassador to Paris is a position of exceptional importance for
economic, political and security issues.Between 1981 and 1986 Essebsi was the country’s foreign minister.After Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba, Essebsi
moved to the legislature where he was president of the Chamber of Deputies from
1990-1991.Essebsi, who would be Prime
Minister in 2011 until he resigned to make way for Ennahda party leader, Hamadi
Jabali, on December 24 thus played a key role in determining the nature of the
democratic transition.Before the
courts in Tunisia (as in Egypt) dissolved the former ruling party in March, the
Interior Ministry had already suspended it from official activity.Essebsi thus presided over the liquidation
of the party in which he had spent most of his adult career and from which he
would draw many of the leaders for the new party he created for the 2014
legislative elections.Essebsi and his
associates were quintessentially what Egyptians derided as “feloul” or the
remnants of the old regime.

It is possible that Essebsi
only pursued this course under the pressure of demonstrations, but nevertheless
it was Essebsi and a number of politicians from the old regime as well as some
of their long-standing opponents who bore the responsibility for shaping a
democratic outcome in Tunisia.Thus,
speaking on November 10, 2011 at the African Media Leaders forum, Essebsi noted
that it was his government’s responsibility to ensure that the Tunisian
revolution did not devolve into a fratricidal conflict nor deviate from what he
called its virtuous path.

Among the
consequential choices his government made was the exclusion of members of the
CDR from participating in the elections for the constituent assembly.Arguably even more important, however, was
the decision to encourage human rights activist Kamel Jendoubi to preside over
the commission charged with writing the relevant electoral law and carrying out
the election itself, ISIE.Jendoubi and
his fellow commissioners chose to employ a particular version of proportional
representation that provided Ennahda with the number of seats that corresponded
to its share of the vote but that also privileged smaller parties.Other electoral rules, including other
versions of proportional representation, would have translated Ennahda’s 38 %
share of the popular vote into a majority of seats rather than the plurality it
actually received.Ennahda thus, by
design, was unlikely to control the constituent assembly without receiving an
overwhelming majority of the popular vote.

Ennahda had the votes
in the constituent assembly to impose a constitutional article banning members
of the old ruling party from engaging in politics.In fact, just such an article (116) was
drafted into the Tunisian constitution by a majority.Under the rules of the assembly, however, it
was rejected because it did not have the necessary super-majority.The measure
failed to gain a super-majority in large part because of significant number of
Ennahda delegates abstained.Such a
constitutional article would have been an insuperable barrier to the old
political elite regaining influence through electoral politics and would have
made the creation of Essebsi’s Nida’ Tounis, the largest party after the last
elections, impossible.The most widely
cited argument for not excluding former members of the CDR was simply that
there is, in a democracy, no reason for stripping individuals of their political
rights unless they have been convicted of criminal activity.Whether Ennahda representatives were
convinced of this argument on its merits or simply took a more hard-nosed view
of the likely results of excluding their long-time opponents we do not know,
but their decision was consequential.

In Egypt events have
worked out quite differently.There are,
of course, many contextual differences between Egypt and Tunisia but one
obvious and crucial difference was the inability or unwillingness of the Muslim
Brotherhood to find a way to compromise with members of the old regime.On the contrary, the Muslim Brotherhood often
sought to marginalize and exclude as much of the NDP as possible. These
attempts to marginalize and exclude the NDP and its cadre as well as its
leadership were highly popular with a significant portion of the Egyptian
public.The top NDP leadership included
prominent businessmen, religious officials, and government officials all of
whom were widely derided as corrupt figures of an authoritarian regime.

Days before Husni
Mubarak resigned, on February 6, 2011 Vice President Omar Suleiman met with
members of the opposition including the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to
broker an agreement about the future of Egypt. These were the days in which
several groups of so-called “wise men”, including some of Egypt’s wealthiest
and most important businessmen as well as academic figures and former officials
engaged a public dialogue through public statements and occasional interviews.Other opposition leaders including Muhammad
El-Baradei opposed the talks which were unpopular with the demonstrators in
Tahrir Square. The Obama administration backed the talks as a way out of the
impasse in Egypt.Both President Obama
and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called for an orderly transition.Some disarray in the American position
occurred when former US Ambassador Frank Wisner stated that Mubarak would have
to stay in office indefinitely.Press
reports indicated that Mubarak would have agreed not to run for a new term and
that some changes in the laws regarding freedom of expression would have been
made.

The first attempt to broker some kind of
agreement or transitional pact foundered.Subsequently there were occasional talks between leaders of the MB and
some of their political competitors and more than occasional claims that the MB
had worked out a deal with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces but nothing
of the kind ever happened.Talks
routinely broke down; bargains once made were scuttled; and a heightened sense
of distrust permeated relationships between all the dominant actors during the
period after Mubarak left office.

Unlike in
Tunisia, it proved, for example, very difficult to win agreement on the nature
of the electoral process as well as substantively limiting the ability of the
Islamist movements to dominate the legislature.After initially promising to limit itself to contesting 25 % of the
seats, the MB finally decided to contest nearly everywhere.SCAF found it difficult to choose among a
variety of electoral schemes but ultimately chose a mixed system in which some
seats were contested by party list and others by individual candidacy.Parties were nevertheless allowed to contest
the individual seats although it was widely known that the Supreme
Constitutional Court, in several prior decisions, had ruled such contestation unconstitutional.

Anger and
contempt for the political figures of the old regime were common through the
first year of the uprising in Egypt and the MB began to present themselves as a
party dedicated to reforming Egypt by continuing the revolution.Key to this objective was eliminating the
“feloul” or remnants of the old regime.This was surprising to many Egyptians because there was no reason to
believe that the MB planned to make significant or rapid changes to the
country’s economic or governmental structures which would have been the hallmark
of a revolutionary party as widely understood in Western as well as Egyptian
academic literature.

Circumspect
as the MB was, however, their reaction to the so-called Selmi document of late
2011 shows how different the situation in Egypt was from what obtained in
Tunisia.Ali Al-Selmi, vice prime
minister, drafted a proposal that had the backing of SCAF and the government
which was then still dominated by liberal elements of the old regime and a
handful of its liberal opponents.He
offered a set of supra-constitutional principles to guide the work of the
still-to-be chosen constituent assembly which had many substantive similarities
to earlier such statements issued by the Muslim Brotherhood, his own Wafd
party, and independent forces in March 2011.It only allowed the civilian government to consider the total budgetary
allocation to the Armed Forces and it gave SCAF the right to prior review of
any legislation affecting the army.There was opposition to ratifying the military’s hitherto unofficial
authority in the new constitution, but the subsequent constitution drafted a
year later by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly gave the Armed Forces
significantly more control over its own finances and the government.

His proposal also included significant
restrictions on how the still to be chosen legislature could choose the
constituent assembly.First, Selmi
proposed that elected legislators not be allowed to serve as members of the
constituent assembly.He also proposed a
corporatist plan through which the SCAF would appoint the bulk of the members
of the constituent assembly from the existing institutional framework of
Egyptian society in which unions, professional associations, and other groups
would choose their own representatives.

If implemented, his proposal placed
mild substantive constraints on what the assembly could write but it
egregiously violated one of the few obviously legitimate elements of the
transitional process.That an elected
legislature would choose the constituent assembly was one of a handful of
provisions that had been the object of the March 19 referendum.The MB called for massive demonstrations against
the Selmi proposals and hundreds of thousands of people mobilized against them
including sections of the left. Selmi himself became a lightning rod for
protest and mistrust because of his own connections to the old regime. Selmi
has a doctorate in economics and had served previously in Mubarak
cabinets.He was a prominent member of
the Wafd, generally considered a secular pro-business party with a significant
Christian base of support.Rejecting the
Selmi placed the MB firmly on the side of electoral legitimacy but it suggested
an at best limited tolerance for reaching substantive agreements with the
social, political or economic elite of the old regime.

The Muslim
Brotherhood initiated demonstrations in Tahrir Square and were able to mobilize
significant support against the proposal on November 18, 2011.Police later attacked a sit-in by relatives
of the people killed in the initial uprising and protests continued.These included particularly violent
confrontations between the police and youth, many of whom were drawn from the
ranks of soccer fans and from poorer neighborhoods, which left 41 dead and
perhaps 1,000 wounded.The Selmi
document was another victim and so was the government of Prime Minister Essam
Sharaf who resigned on November 21.He
was replaced by Kamal Ganzouri, who had served as prime minister under Hosny
Mubarak from 1996 to 1999.

From the
left the Muhammad Mahmoud events were widely viewed at the time as evidence
that the Muslim Brotherhood was uninterested in pursuing the revolution to
establish a democratic order.Viewed in
the framework of Tunisian politics, however, they suggest a different interpretation:the Muslim Brotherhood refused to reach an
agreement with members of the old regime about the new structure of the
state.The mobilization of street
demonstrations and the willingness to accept the outcome of the violent confrontations
that it had neither solicited nor endorsed placed the Muslim Brotherhood on a
distinct path in the months to come.This was the path of electoral politics, themselves a fundamental
process for representative democracy.It
was also, however, a path in which elections and demonstrations together could
be used to marginalize and diminish the role of other institutions of the state
as well as the political opponents of the electoral victors.

In the
succeeding months a far more brutal and direct battle for power developed in
Egypt that took the country in a very different direction from Tunisia.The Muslim Brotherhood coalition gained 45 %
of the seats in the new parliament and, in alliance with the Salafi “Islamist
bloc”, could control the new legislature.Among other measures it enacted a political ban on members of the old
ruling party which, like its Tunisian equivalent, had been dissolved.The Supreme Constitutional Court struck down
this law as unconstitutional, using language similar to that deployed by
Tunisian legislators in rejecting Article 116.The Court also voided the elections to the lower house because the
electoral rules violated established court doctrine about the rights of
voters.

This is not
the place to discuss in detail the long conflict between the Muslim
Brotherhood, the courts, and members of the old political class.It is telling that the MB, despite its
commitment to the electoral process and its claims to the necessity of the
alternation of power, remained unwilling to allow the one set of political
activists most likely to challenge its dominance successfully to compete in an
organized fashion for power.It is in
this sense that the MB can legitimately claim to be a revolutionary force.The MB was certainly not an ideological party
committed to socialism, income redistribution, or secularism.For reasons that are too complex to address
here they were certainly committed to eliminating a significant fraction of the
old political class (the “feloul” or remnants of the old regime) and moved as
rapidly as they could to do so.

No doubt
the stories of the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences of political conflict in
the wake of authoritarian collapse are more complex than the one I have told
here. I plan to examine some of those
aspects, including the role of the army, elsewhere. The advantage of this
story, however, is that it takes our attention away from the problems of
secularism, post-secularism, moderation, radicalism and religion and places it
firmly back into the structure of conflict and accommodation between political
and institutional forces.

Sometime before
his tragically premature death I had coffee one morning with Samir Soliman, the
respected Egyptian political scientist.In the years since it has become common to argue that the failure of the
Egyptian revolution and Egyptian democracy can both be attributed to the
failure of the secular left to organize sufficient popular support to challenge
the Muslim Brotherhood.Seen in this
optic the tragedy of Egypt is the fault of the middle-class intellectuals who
played such conspicuous roles in front of the television cameras in the early
days of the uprising in 2011.Samir had
a different view of how democracy, if it was to work at all, would work in Egypt.The only party that could conceivably
challenge the MB and alternate with it, he argued, was a conservative party. Committed
as he was personally to the politics of the left, he did not that day argue
that the liberal left would be a likely counterweight to the MB nor did he
mention from where such a party would draw its leaders or members.

In Tunisia
it is clear that a conservative-centrist party has emerged to challenge Ennahda
and its roots are heavily in the old regime although it also boasts other
supporters.In Egypt for a variety of
reasons no alternate center-conservative party was built.That would have necessarily been a party with
deep roots in the old NDP, the party many of whose members have re-emerged
since the coup.In the absence of a
thorough-going revolutionary exclusion, they would, I think, have re-emerged
anyway.The question is whether they did
so through elections or as part of an anti-electoral coalition.Attempting to exclude the economic and
political elites of the old regime may have seemed like both revolutionary and
democratic good sense to the Muslim Brothers and to many Islamists and leftists
between 2011 and 2014.

Egyptian
revolutionaries (in the conventional left-wing sense) and the leaders of the MB
feared the re-emergence of the feloul as a political force.They correctly understood that a powerful
conservative party with significant support from Egypt’s business elite was not
a friend.Such a political grouping was
not inclined to support either the projects of economic and social equality
that animated the left or the projects of creating new state institutions that
the MB favored.The MB were committed to
elections. As the old elite increasingly re-asserted itself the MB responded by
attempting to marginalize both their institutional and electoral capacity. In
this they echoed the very old concern of revolutionaries in Europe and Latin
America that electoral democracy is not necessarily the friend of movements for
economic redistribution nor do they necessarily lend themselves to the creation
of strong protections for the political, civil, or social rights of the poor
and the weak.

The idea that democracy is the last
station on the revolutionary road remains seductive and it informs a certain idealized
understanding of American history and the process of democratization.Representative democracy itself, however, is
less likely the successful conclusion of revolution and more likely the
premature end of its utopian hopes and dreams.Only if nothing changes, can everything change.